openSUSE 13.1 will replace GStreamer 0.10 with GStreamer 1.0. This can have huge impact on openSUSE / GNOME as multimedia playback, Nautilus preview and many applications depend on GStreamer framework.

openSUSE 13.1 is expected to drop sysvinit completely and move to systemd completely.

openSUSE 13.1 will feature a new reborn YaST with a Ruby back-end instead of YCP and the project is progressing well and milestone 4 YaST will be powered by Ruby.

You can access, read and write contents from Hard disk to Live ISO session and vice versa

Live ISO Preparation

Download Live ISO

The openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 4, GNOME live ISO (64 bit ) was downloaded from the developer page using aria2 client which makes use of Metalink technology. Metalink can deliver very fast download speeds since clients support multiple connections, to multiple mirrors, automatically. In addition,
it can do automatic error detection and correction.

Verify ISO

The md5 associated to the ISO was downloaded and the ISO was verified using md5sum command. Ensure that both the ISO and md5 files are in the same folder and run the command as shown below. If you get a "OK" after execution, it indicates that the ISO is not corrupted.

After verifying the ISO I used SUSE Studio Image Writer to write the ISO onto a blank USB / Flash / Pen / Thumb drive. Imagewriter is available in openSUSE repos. It is also usable on Windows and other Linux distributions like Fedora, Red Hat (RHEL) and Mandriva. The Linux versions can be downloaded from this page.

GNOME Live ISO Overview/Review

The default desktop is no different from GNOME 3.0 and minimalistic but it does have a right click functionality which allows one to :-

Change Desktop settings (gnome-control-center)

Change wallpaper

Curiously, the much hated, "Universal Access" settings has been removed from the top panel.

openSUSE 13.1, M4 features GNOME Version 3.9.1 and openSUSE 13.1 will be called "Bottle" . Here is a screenshot of GNOME settings "Details" which can be invoked using command "gnome-control-center" and navigating to "Details".

The Details application can be used to:-

View System info like openSUSE and GNOME versions, System architecture etc.

Tweak tool (gnome-tweak-tool) has minimal changes when compared to GNOME 3.6. It now includes facility to customize the wallpaper settings like Stretch, Center, Scale, Span, Zoom and None.

The "Activities" application window has undergone major changes. The applications are no longer grouped under various types like Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet etc.. There is a button/slider which can be used to switch between full list of applications and recently used applications as shown below.

Though applications are no longer classified into types, two new type of application categorization/grouping have emerged in GNOME 3.9.1 namely "Sundry" and "Utilities". Clicking on these application type/group opens a kind of pop up window revealing applications under those categories. The following screenshot shows applications under "Sundry" Category.

The Application search functionality has been improved in Activities window and the search results appear in an orderly fashion and are grouped appropriately.

GNOME Control Center Improvements

The Control Center has undergone major upgrades and the number of "configurable" items has been increased drastically. Some of them are described below.

The Activities based search can be easily customized through Search Settings to allow/disallow searching for Documents, Contacts, Files and passwords

The Privacy Settings can be used to activate automatic screen locking, setting up of cleaning Temporary files, Remove user name from Top panel / bar etc.

The "Users" setting now has a button which on clicking shows a User's Login history.

Firefox plays html5 videos very well. The video is from Anime "Shingeki no kyojin".

Enabling GNOME Shell Classic

Install GNOME Shell Classic

I use zypper(command line based package manager) to install the package named gnome-shell-classic and the package gets installed successfully as shown below.

$sudo zypper install gnome-shell-classic

Activate GNOME Shell Classic

Open Shell Activities(left win key) and locate YaST and then open /etc/sysconfig Editor. sysconfig Editor can be used to set various system level settings. In sysconfig navigate to Desktop > Window manager > DEFAULT_WM and change it's value from "gnome" to "gnome-classic" as shown below and save it. After logout and login GNOME classic will get applied/enabled.

GNOME Classic Overview

GNOME Classic restores the classic GNOME 2.X desktop on GNOME Shell. You can see the following changes:-

Main menu and Places menu are seen in top panel.

Icons are seen on desktop.

Time is moved right hand side of panel.

Bottom Panel has an application switcher to show show and switch between opened applications.

Classic Alt + Tab behaviour is restored.

Default Screen for GNOME classic or GNOME 2.X desktop

GNOME Main menu as seen on GNOME classic

Classic Alt+Tab behaviour

Shortcomings of M4 Live ISO

GTK YaST works but YaST installer is broken. The workaround is to use ncurses version of YaST or zypper

Saturday, 1 June 2013

The other day, when i asked for some details about outlets from my telephone / cellphone provider by email they replied back to me and sent an attachment (spreadsheet) in ods format which was a pleasant surprise.

In the "past" I have only seen proprietary formats like .xls, .doc, .ppt in my emails as attachments. I used to tear my hair out when I saw haphazard tables and overflowing text whenever I opened "word" documents in LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The less said about opening Excel with "macros" in LibreOffice / OpenOffice the better. Guess, those days of excruciating pain are finally over and we can all move towards a bright future where data is shared in Open document formats.

At first time login, Razor-qt provides a dialogue box with a list of window managers and I chose Openbox

The default desktop looks conservative with a touch of gloss. The analog clock adds a nice touch to the desktop.

We see a traditional main menu (Alt+F1)

Lot of plugins / applets can be added to panel by right clicking on it. We can see Application Menu, Quick Launch, Task Manager, Colour Picker, Lock Tool, CPU Usage tool, Network Usage tool, Show Desktop tool etc.. added in the screenshot below

Each plugin on panel can be customised. Task Manager can be customised to make opened applications look like squares instead of rectangles.

Desktop icons / items can be added by creating launchers inside ~/Desktop folder by using commands like "gnome-desktop-item-edit 1.desktop"

Razor runner makes launching applications keyboard friendly (Alt+F2).

Razor Configuration Center

The Razor Settings applet / plugin on the panel is very useful in configuring the desktop. "Razor Session Configurator" can be used to make applications like Artha(Dictionary tool) to start along with the desktop.

To change themes we need to use both "Openbox Configuration Manager" as well as "Razor Appearance Configuration" .

"Razor Shortcut Configuration" can be used to create keyboard shortcuts to launch applications easily using keyboard.

Saturday, 4 May 2013

To configure mouse settings from command line we can use an utility called "xinput". The manual for xinput defines it as a utility to list available input devices, query information about a device and change input device settings. i.e. xinput can be used to configure a variety of input devices like mouse, keyboard etc...

List Connected Devices

On a GNOME 3.x desktop we can open command launcher (Alt+F2) and then use the command "gnome-terminal" to open terminal.

To list all the devices connected to a machine we can run the following command in terminal xinput --list. In the following screenshot you can find that an optical mouse is connected to the machine and assigned a "device id 8".

Enable and Disable the device

Sometimes we don't want mouse movement to bring up a machine from sleep. To disable the input device(mouse), we find the device id by listing all devices as shown above. After finding the device id of the mouse (8) we can run the following command in terminal to disable the mouse xinput --disable 8. Similarly to enable mouse again we can run the command xinput --enable 8. To make things more convenient we can set keyboard shortcuts for these commands as shown below

Switch mouse buttons from right handed to left handed

I for one use, "left handed" mouse settings . I find that on some "light weight" desktops, GUI based mouse settings are often not available which makes changing mouse settings a hassle. xinput comes to the rescue in these cases. To get the default mouse button mapping the following command can be used :- xinput get-button-map 8. To change the default mapping from right to left you can use the command xinput set-button-map 8 3 2 1. The following screenshot shows the demo.

The above setting made through terminal will last only for one login session but, we can "apply" this setting every time we login by plugging the relevant command into the ~/.profile file in "home" directory as shown below.

Perform some advanced settings which is sometimes not possible to do from even the applications. It is possible to reduce inbox refresh time to 30 seconds in Evolution. In this case it is accomplished by changing schema "org.gnome.evolution.mail"

Evolution interface allows minimum refresh rate of 1 minute

dconf Editor allows reduction of refresh rate to 30 seconds.

Change default directory where the screenshots are stored if "Print Screen" button is pressed. In this case schema that is modified is "org.gnome.gnome-screenshot"

We can change mouse button modifier (Modifier to use for modified window click actions) from <SUPER> or "Win" key to <ALT>. You can use "Alt" key and click on any open window to "drag" it around. The schema to be changed in this case is "org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences".

It can serve as a replacement / alternative for "gnome-tweak-tool" and "gnome-control-center". Most of the settings in Tweak tool are available / changed using dconf Editor.

Change mouse from left to right click by editing the schema "org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.mouse" as shown below.

Saturday, 13 April 2013

MozPlugger is a generic Mozilla plug-in that allows the use of standard Linux programs as plug-ins for media types on the Internet. MozPlugger will help the Mozilla / Gecko based browsers to handle a variety of file formats like pdf, office formats (xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, doc, docx), LibreOffice file formats etc. Without installing mozplugger we find that very few file types are present in "Helper Applications" window in both SeaMonkey and Firefox.

SeaMonkey with few content types in Helper Applications

Firefox also shows only a few content types in Application preferences

When i try to open a sample xls file hosted online SeaMonkey tries to download and open it outside the browser.

The Nautilus-Image-Converter is an extension that allows you to resize / rotate images from Nautilus. This extension is very useful when uploading images to websites (size limitations), creating thumbnails etc.

Step3:- Using zypper we can install the relevant extension using command "sudo -u root zypper in nautilus-image-converter".

Step4:- Use the context menu (or) right click menu to "rotate" and resize images. The extension automatically appends a ".resized" and ".rotated" string to the names of newly created files, lest the original file gets overwritten.

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